Dec 4 2021
By:
Scott Sumner
The Economist has an interesting story on laws allowing for physician assisted dying for people with certain health conditions. The first such law was passed in Northern Australia back in 1995. More recently, many other jurisdictions have adopted similar laws. This map caught my eye:With the exception of Hawaii, every ...
Dec 4 2021
By:
Pedro Almeida Jorge
Autumn is usually the time when countries’ parliaments try to reach an agreement on the amount of taxes to be paid during the twelve months of the coming year. If, as many people seem to believe, "taxes are the price of civilization," this seems to imply not only that we live under the implicit threat of barbaric cha...
Dec 3 2021
By:
David Henderson
My wife and I finished the first season of the crime drama Shetland on Amazon Prime and are now onto the third season. (It seems that they skipped Season 2.) In the first episode of Season 3, there's a great scene where one person lays out accurately an illustration of the law of unintended consequences and the othe...
Dec 3 2021
By:
Pierre Desrochers
Another UN Conference of the Parties (COP) held to “unite the world to tackle climate change” recently came to a close. While critical discussions of the scientific and policy rationales promoted at these meetings typically address the validity of climate models, the costs and benefits of various proposals and the ...
Dec 3 2021
By:
Walter Block
Adherents of the Public Choice school of economic thought accept the neoclassical economist’s erroneous views on monopoly and antitrust laws hook, line, and sinker. They take seriously the perfectly competitive model as a criterion against which to measure the operation of the real-world economy. For them, the deside...
Dec 3 2021
By:
Pierre Lemieux
The Federal Trade Commission is in the news these days. Its glorified bureaucrats issued “orders” (not loving appeals for cooperation!) regarding an instance of their “wide-ranging studies that do not have a specific law enforcement purpose,” what the FTC chairman also calls “market studies.” It is a “mar...
Dec 2 2021
By:
David Henderson
For most of my teaching career, I was an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. My students were generally motivated, reasonably hard-working military officers from the Navy, other US services, and other countries. I loved teaching them. But one day in the mid-1990s I told them a true anecdote whose shoc...
Read this Pierre Lemieux Liberty Classic:
Nov 5 2018
By Pierre Lemieux
James Buchanan is not easy to categorize. Is he a libertarian? A classical liberal? A conservative? Or perhaps even a "liberal" in the modern American sense of "progressive" or "social democrat"? Is he an economist or a philosopher? It is paradoxical but not totally wrong to answer "all of the above," so complex and ri...
Dec 2 2021
By:
Bryan Caplan
"The death penalty deters murder." A classic right-wing idea. So classic, in fact, that it's tempting to think that the idea of deterrence itself is right-wing. Yet on reflection, that's absurd. The left strongly believes in deterrence for discrimination. If you said, "Let's cap discrimination damages at $100...
Dec 2 2021
By:
Pierre Lemieux
To paraphrase the incipit of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (my apologies to Karl Marx), a specter is haunting America---the specter of wokeness. But wokeness has intellectual feet of clay. By the time you read this post, the news of the fake article published by Wiley’s academic journal Higher Education Quarte...
Dec 1 2021
By:
Scott Sumner
In my new book entitled The Money Illusion, I argue that a tight money policy by the Fed in 2008-09 largely caused the Great Recession. I'd guess that 99% of economists don't agree with me on that point. That makes me a contrarian. But if I am a contrarian, it's of a type that is quite common throughout history....
Dec 1 2021
By:
Bryan Caplan
The best deregulation lacks popular appeal. Deregulation of immigration is unpopular. Deregulation of housing is unpopular. Deregulation of labor markets is unpopular. But when the stars align, specific forms of deregulation become potentially popular. All you need is close the deal is some brash populists ...
Nov 30 2021
By:
David Henderson
Let people choose for themselves. No one knows how hard it is. No one knows what we're doing every day and what the challenges are. We were invisible basically, except portrayed as children who wouldn't do what the president wanted to have done. But it was our lives, not his. The above quote is from Anita DeFrantz, w...
Nov 30 2021
By:
Pierre Lemieux
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has censored one episode of “The Simpsons” from Walt Disney’s streaming service in Hong Kong or, we don’t know, it may be the company itself that self-censored (Dan Strumpf, “Disney’s Missing ‘Simpsons’ Episode in Hong Kong Raises Censorship F...
Nov 30 2021
By:
Bryan Caplan
I may have a perfect betting record, but six years ago I made a big generalization that almost instantly blew up in my face. In my youth, I saw Industrial Organization as the heart of our secular religion. My history textbooks loudly and repeatedly decried “monopoly”; teachers, peers, and parents echoed their c...
Nov 29 2021
By:
David Henderson
As a number of economists and others have noted, Richard L. Stroup died on November 18. He was a good and gentle man and a very good economist. He used straightforward microeconomic tools to investigate, and generate insights on, interesting issues. I'll highlight some items from the 10th edition of his textbook, Econo...